Drones, Oscars and football on Prime: Amazon reveals plans for 2016

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The retail giant, which has already won five Emmys for its Amazon Prime Video comedy Transparent, will produce 16 feature films per year in an effort to compete with other acclaimed on-demand studios like Netflix.

The netflix war drama Beasts of No Nation is tipped (by some) for success at 2016's Oscars in February, and Amazon chief Jeff Bezos -- not content with landing a rocket -- wants to match that possible feat as soon as possible. "We want to win an Oscar," Bezos told German daily newspaperDie Welt.

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ByMatt Burgess

There will certainly be people to watch it: Amazon said separately on Monday that it sold three million Prime subscriptions in the third week of December, with double the total holiday viewing hours of 2014.

Prime is already ramping up its original content efforts in other ways, including producing a series with fired BBC Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson and cohorts, which will be launched in Spring 2016. But with a production studio established in LA, Bezos said he wants to give "masters like Spike Lee or Woody Allen" total creative control.

By comparison, Netflix is currrently producing around 10 feature films per year, and plans to double its number of original series to more than 30 in 2016. For Amazon to target an Oscar is hardly surprising, given its CEO's ambitions in other areas including space travel and drone deliveries: what is surprising, perhaps, is that no one would bet against them achieving it.

In the same interview, Bezos said that he would not rule out bidding on sports events such as the football World Cup or the Bundesliga, Germany's equivalent of the Premier League. "Sport is an interesting area," Bezos said.

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Bezos also spoke about his ambitions in space, drawing parallels between private space investment and the first Nasa missions to the Moon. "When I was five years old, I saw Neil Armstrong on the television screen while as he took his first steps on the moon. This had a great impact on me," Bezos said, according to a translation. "I wanted to fly into space forever. I think that we humans should explore the solar system."

On Prime Air, Amazon's incipient drone delivery system, Bezos said that the "technology is very advanced already" but admitted that regulatory issues might hold it back, at least in the United States. "We continue to work with different regulators around the world. One of the regulatory agencies that's moving fastest on this is the UK, so it's possible that drone deliveries will start first in the UK."